Magazine PALAIS #25

The exhibition “Le Rêve des formes” has been conceived as an imaginary landscape, a monstrous garden cultivating perishable forms, germinating surfaces, and protuberant organisms. With a good forty artists and scientists, the show has been designed along two routes: on the one hand, the rediscovery of the world of the living in all of its diversity, through an exploration of dynamic, mimetic or naturalistic forms; on the other, an exploration of mutant or algorithmic forms, inspired by mathematics, computing and artificial intelligence. The exhibition “Le Rêve des formes” aims at questioning the meeting points between artistic and scientific research: how do today’s artists and scientists come up with original visual solutions, which help to reinvent the geometry of thought, outside familiar territories?

In this issue:

Alain Fleischer and Claire Moulène, the exhibition’s curators, introduce what is at stake in the exhibition “Le Rêve des formes.” Olivier Perriquet presents the work of the research group which, at Le Fresnoy, brought together both artists and scientists from different fields around the question of the “incertitude of forms,” thus preceding and nourishing the exhibition “Le Rêve des formes.”

* Special contributions from artists and scientists taking part in the exhibition

The artist Anicka Yi is here in conversation with three biology researchers she recently worked with on the conception of new works. The composer Arnaud Petit explores how music creates a dialogue between words, writing and mathematics. The artist Hicham Berrada and the researcher Annick Lesne focus on moving, self-organised forms. The stage director Jean-François Peyret and the neurobiologist Alain Prochiantz share their fascination in primates through a mischievous encyclopaedia. The artist SMITH and the cosmologist Jean-Philippe Uzan have imagined the history of a new humanity, on a quest for an organic link with the stars. Bertrand Dezoteux, in an animated film, has invented an interconnected world inspired from the research of the biologist Lynn Margulis into the arrival and development of life on earth.

* In a special dossier

The literature researcher Marielle Macé is in conversation with Claire Moulène about the “forms of life.” In a “speculative fantasy,” the biologist, philosopher and science historian Donna Haraway imagines a symbiotic future between the various species on earth. Jens Hauser, exhibition curator and mediology researcher, analyses how, by adopting biotechnologies as a medium, artists have shaken up the relationship between art and life. The philosopher FrédericNeyrat examines our humanism in an essay about transhumans, posthumans, androids and cyborgs.